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Scramble on to replace Montessori materials

A potentially monumental task lies ahead for proponents of Montessori-style education in the city as a result of Monday's fire at the Highglen Montessori elementary school.

A potentially monumental task lies ahead for proponents of Montessori-style education in the city as a result of Monday's fire at the Highglen Montessori elementary school.

Tens of thousands of dollars worth of specialized education material may have been lost in the blaze and while parents, teachers and students will be happy with just pens and paper when they resume classes Monday at a reopened Gladstone elementary school, finding a way to replace those items will be top of mind.

A way to donate online has been posted at the Prince George Montessori Education Society website (www.pgmontessori.ca) - $800 was raised as of Wednesday morning - but that will likely be only the beginning of the effort, PGMES chair Tracy Summerville said.

"Really, Highglen was 20 years of collecting Montessori materials and much of that came from fundraising that came from families over many, many years," Summerville said.

How much material was lost is still to be determined but Summerville said she's heard $20,000 as the rule-of-thumb for outfitting a Montessori classroom.

"I can't even tell you how many materials are in those classrooms because it's all manipulatives," Summerville said. "There's not even really any desks lined up, it's just tables where students work and all around on the edges are all of these Montessori materials that students use in their learning."

Cash may be only part of the answer. Some of the materials are handmade.

"We have these special manipulatives that are used for math called golden beads and many of our families strung the beads onto strings...so we might actually come out to the community and say help us reconstruct some of this stuff," Summerville said.

Parents were to work on firmer plans when they met Wednesday evening but Summerville said a corporate sponsor or two would help in terms of getting some materials into the new classrooms over the short term.

"It's going to be a lot of money and it's not going to happen right away," Summerville said. "I think we're all very realistic about the fact that we have an uphill battle."